Modified topology-hiding multipath routing (M-THMR) protocol: Solution to the topology exposure problem in MANET

Abstract

In the past few years MANETs had widespread usage in different applications. However, in-spite of having many advantages, they are prone to some serious security issues one of which being the topology exposure problem. Though there exist several Ad-hoc routing protocols that deal with some security issues in the MANETs, they hardly deal with the topology exposure problem, which makes them vulnerable to attack. Due to scarce resources MANETs tends to be difficult to be secured from malicious users. While underlining the necessity of hiding the topology of MANET when designing routing protocols, this paper presents ‘Modified Topology-Hiding Multipath Routing protocol’ (M-THMR) to address the security challenges in MANET, specifically those related to the topology exposure problem. M-THMR implements mechanisms for hiding the network topology, searching the nodes and avoiding unreliable routes. The paper analyses the general types of attacks on the MANET and shows the relationship between these attacks and the issue of topology exposure. Based on the performance evaluation, it is proposed that the M-THMR possess better capability of finding routes and nonetheless it does not degrade the performance of the network in the absence of attack. Moreover, in an adverse scenario, M-THMR is able to tackle an attack at the cost of very low overhead and short routing convergent time.